One of the key requirements for wireless broadband system development, such as in the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE), is reducing latency in order to improve user experience. From a link layer perspective, the key contributing factor to latency is the round-trip delay between a packet transmission and an acknowledgment of the packet reception. The round-trip delay is typically defined as a number of frames, where a frame is the time duration upon which scheduling is performed. The round-trip delay itself determines the overall automatic repeat request (ARQ) design, including design parameters such as the delay between a first and subsequent transmission of packets, or the number of hybrid ARQ channels (instances). A reduction in latency with the focus on defining the optimum frame duration is therefore key in developing improved user experience in future communication systems. Such systems include enhanced Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access (UTRA) and Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN) (also known as EUTRA and EUTRAN) within 3GPP, and evolutions of communication systems within other technical specification generating organizations (such ‘Phase 2’ within 3GPP2, and evolutions of IEEE 802.11, 802.16, 802.20, and 802.22).
Unfortunately, no single frame duration is best for different traffic types requiring different quality of service (QoS) characteristics or offering differing packet sizes. This is especially true when the control channel and pilot overhead in a frame is considered. For example, if the absolute control channel overhead is constant per user per resource allocation and a single user is allocated per frame, a frame duration of 0.5 ms would be roughly four times less efficient than a frame duration of 2 ms. In addition, different frame durations could be preferred by different manufacturers or operators, making the development of an industry standard or compatible equipment difficult. Therefore, there is a need for an improved method for reducing both round-trip latency and overhead within a communication system.